Aceticon

There's quite a lot of "know your place" in English culture, tough for some decades (in the post War period) that was somewhat suspended and the country had a lot of social mobility and a lot less of "looking up to posh wankers".

You can see it very clearly in things like just how hard the Press promotes the Royals (including The Guardian, who are Liberals rather than leftwing) and the lack of criticism of the System itself (quite the contrary even, and coverage of internation affairs is very heavilly Nationalistic).

What that means in practice is that people tend to worry a lot more about keeping those "below them in the ladder" in their place than they do in climbing the ladder themselves, and the Working Class (who are naturally the ones who get squeezed the most) fighting amongst themselves but not actually against the elites, whilst the Middle Class will do some mild and easilly suppressed demonstrations when they get a bit more squeezed.

Oh, I see the same think in my native Portugal.

As I see it (having left it a year or so before Brexit came into effect) Britain is maybe 10 years ahead of the rest of Europe on the path towards Neoliberal Dystopia (you see it too in other things like Press capture, surveillance society and even the house price inflation.), so some of the social, economic and political problems I see now unfolding in Portugal, I saw in Britain years ago when I lived there.

Britain seem to be trying hard to converge with the US, but only on the bad things rather than the good ones.

That's such an interesting statement.

Irrelevant for my post, since I lived in Britain for over a decade, but interesting.

Thank you for sharing that tidbit about yourself.

The UK is an incredibly Classist society with a long-running "know your place" kind of mindset and very low Social Mobility for an European nation - people very much are defined by their class (all the way to ther being a very specific, non-regional, English language accent for the upper class) and one's social class is very much inherited.

The 60s and the 70s were the peak point for the result of the post War (that being WWII) increase in social mobility in Britain with lots of Working Class lads and lasses making it big in, amongst others, the arts (and you see it not just in Comedy but also Acting more in general and especially in Music were almost every great British star from that age had working class origins).

All this has in the meanwhile being reversed, hence once again almost all modern British artists are the sons and daughters of the upper-middle and upper classes.

During that golden period the massive mix of people from all origins in the arts created all kind of original and "not knowing your place" art expressions, and I believe the Money Pythons are one of those.

Curiously, successive governments in the UK (where The Guardian is based) have been slowly destroying the National Health Service.

They discovered Porn when they got to Russia and have been chronically exhausted ever since...

It's a corrupt system.

It's only weird if you believe the prime function of the police is to protect everybody.

If you think the prime function of the police is to protect the rich and their assets, these action of theirs make perfects sense as do many other actions (such as prioritizing fighting crime against property over stopping violence)

This isn't a "Is killing a person that insulted you right or wrong?" moral conundrum, it's a "If you could kill Hitler after he had started exterminating people, would that be right or wrong?" moral conundrum.

Most people who would say "it's the wrong thing to do" for the first one would say "it's the right thing to do" for the second.

Mind you, the really right thing to do on the situation with this CEO would have been for the State to do its fucking job and protect the people from mass murderers like him, but it refuse to do so, hence here we are in a bad situation.

Well, in the total picture the best option of all would be Justice System which is Just and hence stop people causing massive numbers of deaths for profit, which is not what we have (especially in the US) and is even getting worse.

Ultimately all Just venues (I was going to say "non-violent", but "lawful" violence is still "violence", so even in a Just system, Force would still be used on the ones profiting from mass deaths) seem to have been closed in the last couple of decades.

The more options get closed, the more people will only see as options to either meekly accept the death of a loved one (or oneself) due to the actions of the people leading Health Insurance companies or vigilante vengeance, since the State has over the years removed itself from enacting Justice against the wealthiest in society, which would've been the best option of all (not least because it prevents the deaths of both the victims of guys like this CEO and of guys like the CEO)

Indeed, dichotomies presented in arguments are more often than not false, but sometimes they're true.

I guess we're reaching a stage were most people are both aware of the harm those people do and believe Ju$tice will never do anything about it, quit the opposite.

In summary: Neoliberalism.